ESPNs Leah Hextall on her very difficult first NHL season and the need for change in hockey -

Not long after Leah Hextall returned to her home in Winnipeg, after her first season as the first woman to regularly call play-by-play for nationally-televised NHL games, she had a phone call. It was with her mother, who wanted to know how the whole experience had made her feel.

“I survived,” said Hextall.

Her own response gave her pause: “When I actually heard it out loud, I thought, ‘Why did I say that?’”

Hextall joined ESPN last year, months after the company jumped back into the hockey business with a seven-year deal covering television, streaming and media rights with the NHL. She would spend some of her time as a reporter, but would also work in the booth as the featured voice of the broadcast.

The abuse crashed into her social media accounts like a tidal wave. Hextall had already spent the better part of two decades in sports media and knew that criticism was part of the job, but she had never seen that level or volume of vitriol from an audience. She deactivated a Facebook page, turned off her notifications on Twitter and tightened security controls on Instagram.

“Vile,” she said. “Sexist. Misogynistic. And threatening.”

Messages from angry strangers still found their way to her phone.

“They really do their best to make sure that you see what they have to say about you, and how negative it is,” said Hextall, who also spoke this week on the Sports Media Podcast with The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch. “There just doesn’t seem to be an end to it. That’s where it becomes problematic: It’s not just one game here and there — it’s every single time I am in the booth.”

Hextall, 43, is still sifting for the answer to her mother’s question. Months after getting home from her final assignment of the season, she is not sure she can assess the full toll of the abuse. Not all of it was from strangers, she said, but also in gendered whispers and actions within the hockey community.

“I love my job, and I love what I was doing, but it was very difficult this year,” she said. “It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t showing up to the rink and feeling like I was working in a candy store, like it usually would when I cover hockey.

“There was a lot of, more than anything, mental gymnastics to go through. There was a lot of criticism — not just within the social media audience, but also within the brethren of hockey — that I was not used to facing. And a lot of it seemed to stem from my gender.”

A game in late April became a flashpoint. Hextall was stationed between the benches for a postseason preview featuring the Tampa Bay Lightning and Toronto Maple Leafs. Two players with iron knuckles began an animated discussion, yelling across the area where Hextall was standing.

The Lightning’s Pat Maroon was bellowing at the Leafs’ Wayne Simmonds, alleging both he and his Toronto teammates were soft. Sensing a story, Hextall requested to speak with Simmonds during her intermission segment. She smirked as she asked him about the exchange: “He called you ‘soft’ — my question is: Are you?”

“You should ask him,” Simmonds said. “We’ve never dropped the gloves. He’s never obliged me before. So I don’t know. I don’t think I’m the one that’s soft.”

That final snippet of the interview went viral online. An unverified Twitter account bearing the name of former NHL referee Tim Peel was harshly critical of Hextall: “Asking Wayne Simmons’s [sic] if he is soft might be one of the most ridiculous questions I have ever heard. Do your homework.”

“I’m just going to say it,” said Hextall. “If I was a man, I don’t think that’s what he would have done.”

The tweet picked up steam, and her question rocketed around the internet without any context.

“I know Wayne Simmonds isn’t soft,” said Hextall. “Wayne Simmonds knows he isn’t soft. I’m building on the drama of what’s been going on in the game, and I can’t help it that you didn’t watch the game and only saw the clip — that’s on you, not on me.”

I will take a lot of heat for this but I am a big boy. Leah Hextall doesn’t even know they have not fought before. Asking Wayne Simmons’s if he is soft might be one of the most ridiculous questions I have ever heard. Do your homework. @leahhextall #leafs https://t.co/zxsw26rRfQ

— Tim Peel (@TimCPeel20) April 22, 2022

Hextall grew up with one of the most well-known hockey surnames in Manitoba. Her cousin, Ron, was a famously pugnacious NHL goaltender. Her uncles, Dennis and Bryan, both played in the league. Her grandfather, Bryan, scored the Stanley Cup-clinching goal for the New York Rangers in 1940, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1969.

His granddaughter wears his induction ring for big events. Leah Hextall said it is the last thing she will put on in the hotel before heading to the rink. She said she usually taps the front of it just before the red light goes on before a broadcast.

She also wore it earlier this summer, during a presentation delivered to hockey coaches on a stage at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. She was a speaker at a conference hosted by The Coaches Site, a company that shares best practices from behind the bench, and she wanted to talk about her experience.

Hextall also wanted to offer a plan to increase representation in some of the game’s most visible roles: Teams and companies had to begin hiring with “intent” to make change, she said.

“There’s a culture that believes when a woman is hired in a high-profile, visible, important role in the game, that she has been hired because of her gender, or to check a box,” she said. “This then upsets members of our audience, because they don’t feel it’s fair. They dislike it, and that breeds contempt for women in these roles.

“Whereas when men are hired, you don’t see a statement, ‘It’s because he’s a man,’ because men have always held these roles, traditionally.”

Unless hockey finds a way to bring more women into the game, she said, that culture will not change.

“The fact is: If we continue to hire the most qualified candidate, we will not see women in all roles across our game,” she said. “Because how can a woman be the most qualified candidate when she hasn’t had the opportunities to gain the necessary experience to do so?

“Because, for the past 100-plus years, this has been a male-dominated sport on every level.”

She said companies — be it teams or networks — have to create opportunities.

“It doesn’t mean giving the job to someone who doesn’t have qualifications,” said Hextall. “But there’s no way a woman can be as qualified as a man because she hasn’t had those opportunities. So there has to be intent in the hiring process.”

Hextall had plenty of experience in sports media before she joined ESPN, but mostly as a reporter and as a studio host, and not as a play-by-play voice. She had experience with NESN, as well as “Hockey Night in Canada,” but she was still learning the ropes behind the main microphone.

She had called play-by-play for the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League and, in 2019, she became the first woman to call the NCAA men’s hockey title game for ESPN. She said she was not the most experienced voice ESPN could have hired when it secured the NHL broadcast rights last year.

“With intent, they provided the opportunity to a qualified candidate to gain the experience, to become the most qualified candidate for the job in the future,” said Hextall. “I was not the most qualified NHL candidate they could have had.

“But because of all those reasons I just stated, ESPN understood: ‘If we don’t give this person the opportunity, it’s never going to happen.’”

She said she knows not everyone will agree: “But if you don’t agree with what I’m saying, it’s likely because you’ve had the opportunities in your life, and you haven’t experienced this, where you’re not represented.

“At the end of the day, if you’re ignoring 51 per cent of the population, you’re lacking diversity of thought,” she continued. “And you’re lacking the fact that you’re not representing half the world. And from that, we cultivate a culture that unfortunately is sexist and misogynist within our game.”

Near the end of her presentation to the coaches in Michigan, Hextall described one of the worst notes she received. She said it was sent late one night during the playoffs, after she had called a game. It was sent to her email via the website she maintains for her public speaking business.

“You live in Winnipeg, it wouldn’t be very hard to track you down,” she told the audience, describing the message. After threatening assault, the writer continued: “I will then put a gun in your mouth and blow out your brains so no one has to hear you call a hockey game again.”

Hextall said she did not contact police and that only her sister saw the note before it was deleted.

“It was that shocking, more than anything, that someone would have that much anger towards me because I was calling a hockey game,” she said in an interview. “A hockey game. I’m not saving lives here. I’m just calling a hockey game, and you were willing to threaten my physical and sexual safety?”

Hextall emphasized she was not complaining about the job, which she enjoys. She felt it was time to give voice to her experiences around the job and the need for change.

“In hockey, we’re so accustomed to not speaking, to not saying anything because you don’t want to be an individual – you don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “And that has hurt us.”

(Photo: Courtesy of The Coaches Site)

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